Dr. Paul Anderson outlines natural treatments for lingering COVID and vaccine symptoms, categorizing them as small, medium, or large problems. He covers neurological, pulmonary, psychiatric, and immune issues, recommending sensory retraining, specific supplements like curcumin and low-dose naltrexone, and testing for hidden infections like Chlamydia pneumoniae. Recovery takes months and requires working with a healthcare provider.
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This program exists to educate and empower you, the listener. Now, here's your host, Dr. Paul. Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today we're going to get a little more specific into our topic from last week, which is what do we do if we have a post-COVID or or even a post-vaccine effect? What are some of our options? And today what I wanna do is focus on natural treatments. We might actually have a couple things that are on the line of natural or pharmaceutical, but today I really wanted to focus on natural treatments, what research is out there, what we're seeing clinically, all of that stuff. So, A couple of things. First off, as you know, we never give medical advice here. I just give information. And the idea with this is it enlightens you more, and then you can talk to your healthcare team and figure out what's best for you, because what's best for you is going to be very individual. So don't just take this information and go out and, you know, freestyle and do your own thing there. The other thing I wanted to point out, which we do, um, each time, is when I talk about the show notes, or when I say I'm going to put that link in the notes or whatever, those are housed on the YouTube channel. And so, uh, there's 2— is, well, there's many ways to get to a YouTube channel, but my channel, you can go to my hub website, which is dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. And on there's links to everything, including the YouTube. Or you can go to DRA, like Dr. A, DRA space online. Search that on YouTube and usually I will come up. You'll see this same face that you're seeing here if you're watching on Facebook Live or something. Now, if you're on one of the pod burners, we're on just about every podcast service, or if you're on CTR Radio Network, which is our home. The notes won't be on any of those services. You got to go to YouTube for that. Also, people have asked, because I do short videos on TikTok, where's my TikTok thing? That's also DRA_online, but I'll put the link in the show notes as well. So that's all the housekeeping there. And if you ever get lost and need to find any link about me, D-R-A-N-O-W dot com. So there you go. Now the next thing, and I said this a number of times on last week's program when we were talking about post-COVID and post-vaccine and all this business, is the the focus here is not so much on oh you know this is like a pro-vax or anti-vax or pro-COVID or anti-COVID or whatever. This is about the end the end product problem, which is we have humans. are suffering, humans who need appropriate healthcare. And in large measure, it's hard to find because, as I mentioned last time, post-viral illness is a very difficult concept because it's very constitutional, holistic, whatever you want to call that. So while, as I said last time, you know, early on we got these reports and data that would say, well, you know, post-vaccine is going to be a very tiny number of people, you know, with problems, et cetera. Now we're seeing, you know, publications where there's more than a very tiny amount. But the bottom line is it doesn't matter if it's, you know, 1 person or 1,000 people or 10,000 people. 1 person is still injured and there's still things that need to be done. And with any treatment, you're gonna have people have side effects. So we expect that with vaccines, of course. And so there's gonna be some number of people. We're not gonna know the total number of people who have injuries from vaccine until, you know, years from now. So for whatever that's worth. Also with post-COVID, you know, every time we get a new study, there's different numbers out. And again, that doesn't matter. What we want to focus on here today as a segue from last week, which talked a lot about autoimmunity and post-COVID and post-vaccine, all that stuff. Now we want to look at what are the major areas where we clinicians and in the research they're talking about post-COVID or post-vaccine, you're seeing these problems. Regardless of how many people it is, small or large, uh, and what questions are we being asked? And then, um, what are some commonalities and ways we can approach it? And because of, you know, the internet and because of, uh, the magic of, uh, of social media, um, I get a lot of comments and a lot of questions, you know, most of which are really great on the different platforms that I put stuff out on. And so, I've been keeping track of questions people are asking. One of the frustrations people have is, well, you know, I went in and I saw my doctor and they referred me to somebody and everybody tells me I'm fine. And yet they have these pretty profound symptoms. So, one of the things that we, I think, as the medical profession, we're, you know, we need to do better with is you know, gaslighting patients, essentially saying, well, your tests look good, so how sick can you be really, right? And that happens a lot in the chronic illness space. So, you know, I, I'm familiar with that. And, uh, and, and a lot of that comes from the fact that a lot of doctors don't work in the chronic illness space. So the other side of it is a lot of doctors, you know, are into their specialty, which you want a specialist to be into their specialty, but they're looking at a very narrow band of problems and they don't really think beyond that because that's not their job. And unless you have someone doing primary care and kind of quarterbacking your case and looking over it and looking at you holistically, which again is also something that's a little tough for medicine to catch up with, it's really hard to address and treat some of these things. So I wanna get into that and just give you some tools, some things to ask about, some things to look into That sort of thing. Now, the first problem is with post-COVID and post-vaccine, my experience so far has been that everything that we do to try and help somebody takes 2, 3, 4, 5 times longer to resolve than due to normal injury. So, and it doesn't matter at this point clinically whether the COVID did it or the vaccine did it. Doesn't matter. It's, it's going to take a lot longer. Now, as I said last time, a lot of what I'm going to talk about is you need to put through the filter of, do I have a small, medium, or large problem? The reason I keep saying that is a lot of stuff I'm going to talk about is for people with large problems, which in the post-injury or post-COVID world means that you're probably somewhere around 1, 2, 3, 4 months out, or maybe 1 or 2 years out with your problems. The longer you go, the longer it's going to take to get better. And that is if you find the correct sorts of treatments to do. So the first rule of post-COVID or post-vax is you might be able to get treatment early and minimize it, as I was saying last time. You know, in a group surveying about 4,000 patients, people treated early for COVID using a holistic multifactorial approach with lots of different interventions, the number of people hospitalized, very, very tiny out of 4,000. The number of people with post-COVID, very tiny. So early treatment. Well, what if you're beyond early treatment? Now you're saying, geez, it's been 6 months and I still have these symptoms. Well, you got a large-scale type of problem. So, the first thing, and this is also hard for patients and doctors, is we have to realize that if we don't get to you early, or if we don't find exactly the right treatments for you that kind of knocks your problem out fairly early on, you may develop a chronic version of whatever your symptoms are. And it may take months to even years for those to go away. You know, downer as far as if you're the patient, uh, and also if you're the doctor looking at that, because, you know, we're used to seeing things resolve faster. But if you have a large-scale problem or you've been sick a long time, you, you can't expect, uh, you know, major changes and resolution in short, short amounts of time. It's just not going to happen. Now, something I want to talk about, because I got this feedback from somebody And it was good feedback, and that was, well, so my doctor— I'm assuming this is the primary care doctor— sent me to a couple of specialists, and the specialist said I don't have, you know, I don't have any disease that they can find. And so my primary care doctor doesn't know what to do because the specialist said, well, there's no disease here. So one thing I wanted to do right off the top was to categorize the way medicine works with specialists and things of that nature, and that is they are looking literally for pathologies, usually major pathologies within their area of expertise. And you really want specialists if you need to, you know, if you have a cardiac problem, you want a cardiologist. If you have a digestive problem, you want a gastroenterologist, etc. are wonderful, wonderful people to interact with, but they do look in their area of specialty and they don't usually branch out into other areas. That's just not how the system works unless there's a real clear thing. So if they're looking for major pathology and a specialist tells you we find nothing wrong, all that means is that there's no pathology, thank God, that you have, but you have something. Okay, so it doesn't mean you're not sick, and it doesn't mean your symptoms are meaningless. It just means they didn't find anything in their organ system that they work with. So if it's the gastro, it's going to be the digestive system. It's the cardio, it's going to be the, you know, the heart and the vascular system, on and on and on. So I have talked to people who have been to 1, 2, 3, 4 specialists, and they've had tests, and they've had all these things done sort of in isolation, and nobody finds a big disease. Okay, great, you can celebrate that, but they still feel horrible and they've got symptoms. So why would you want then to see a specialist? Well, the reason you see specialists is your primary care, whoever's handling that, has decided that you have symptoms that are concerning enough, or maybe they did some screening labs and those are concerning enough that they want you to see an endocrinologist, or they want you to see a cardio, or whatever they want you to do. Now, so as I said, that's great to rule out big disease. What if you did develop, for example, a dysrhythmia, an arrhythmia? Or what if you did develop, you know, some sort of major hormonal problem? You'd want somebody looking after that, right? But the problem that we normally see with post-COVID, post-vax is if it's not a major thing, and sometimes there are, which is good to rule those out, why either your primary care or your specialists are going to do that. But a lot of times, as I said last time, it's, it's this multifactorial problem where all the body systems are just not working correctly. Maybe they're not talking to each other very well. And so you have to take a constitutional or holistic look at your, at your whole body. to sort this out. So having said that, what are some of the most common areas that I am hearing from patients who have problems, whether it's post-COVID infection or post-vaccine or whatever? Doesn't matter, it's post-something. Aside from the fact that they take very long to heal, usually, what are we seeing? Well, we're seeing neurological complaints from nervous system. We're seeing things like fatigue and exercise intolerance, things of that nature. We're seeing chronic lung issues. We're seeing neuropsychiatric problems. We're seeing immunologic problems. And so those all have some things in common. And I wanna go through some of the unique parts as we go through here and look at what we can do for those. But then I really wanna focus on these things that are in common So for example, where does, you know, immunology and neuropsychiatry and neurology, where do they all come together as far as cause areas go, and what can you do? So first off, let's start out with the, what I'll call the à la carte problems, which are, you know, kind of specific to an organ system. So first off, uh, the nervous system We're seeing a lot of things that relate to kind of 2 major damage areas in the nervous system, and they're actually connected, but they're, they're specific as to symptoms, at least in the beginning. One are specific nerve invasion problems. And those would be things like loss of the sense of smell or taste. So you have these cranial nerves that help you with smell and taste, and those happen to be very close to your brain because they're in your head. The nerves that run smell and taste. And so one of the ways that, that COVID, for example, gets into the brain is through these cranial nerves, but it damages them on the way. So you may have loss of smell or taste. Well, one of the problems that you have there is if that indeed happens, then you have to repair the nerves, and that can take quite a while, and that can take a lot of specific effort. And so, um, we'll talk about what helps the nerves, but that's one big area. Now, the next area is actually a degeneration and inflammation in the central nervous system that happens, and that is a breakdown of the barrier that tries to keep your brain and the rest of you somewhat separate and regulated. It's called the blood-brain barrier. Now, the blood-brain barrier is both more complex, but also probably in some senses more simple than we imagine it. But the bottom line with the blood-brain barrier is it's supposed to be there. It's supposed to allow blood and plasma and things in and out, but it has gates. And these gates are there to make sure that your brain has what it needs, make sure that the stuff that should be in and around your brain stays there, and make sure that toxins in waste get out. So if I take this magical barrier, the blood-brain barrier, and I inflame it and I break it down— which, by the way, happens in all neurological inflammatory diseases, not just COVID— um, if I break it down or inflame it with these inflammatory cytokines, then what happens is you can think of this barrier that's doing all this transactions between the brain and the outside world of the body. And if I break it down, I'm going to have problems. I'm going to have problems regulating my neurohormonal control, my, uh, potentially my, you know, blood sugar control in and out of the brain, um, a bunch of other things. And so this blood-brain barrier breakdown can lead to some of the fatiguing problems. It leads to most of the neuropsychiatric issues that come up after COVID or the vaccine or whatever. It can lead to some of the autoinflammatory problems that can be triggered after these issues. What I want to do is to start, because we're starting with the brain and we're looking at the peripheral or cranial nerve problem of smell and taste, and then we got the central problem of brain inflammation and blood-brain barrier being, uh, you know, incompetent, not working correctly, etc. So what do we do about those things? Well, one of the things that we've seen in the research is, um, there's a lot of research about the mechanisms behind how, say, smell and taste get damaged. There's not as many recommendations for what to do When the smell and taste get damaged. So some of the recommendations I'm going to put forward to you to consider and talk to your healthcare providers about are going to be specific to the nerves and their function, and some are going to be general to the way that post-COVID and post-vaccine affect the whole body, which the brain and the nervous system are included in your whole body. Okay. So one of the things though that we want to think about is with these peripheral problems like smell and taste, there's going to be a number of things that will help your mitochondria and your cells to heal. We'll pick them up in part 2. But in addition to all those things, sensory retraining becomes very important now. Sensory retraining is in the literature around smell and taste loss, and it's usually like, well, if these other things don't work, then, you know, try that. Now, early on, sometimes doctors will give maybe low doses of steroids and other things, you know, different— there's different treatments that maybe the ear, nose, and throat doctor might give you, or your primary care. And the bottom line is they either, you know, start to work or they don't, and your sense of taste and smell come back or they don't. But if you've been more than 2 or 3 months and you're still having smell and taste problems, then you have this collusion of nerve inflammation from the front back to the brain, brain inflammation, and then blood-brain barrier breakdown. And then you've got all these other cell problems that come along. Yeah. talk about in part 2. When we are thinking about helping to repair with this sense of smell and taste, either post-COVID or post-vaccine, what we want to think about there is, if I have done the standard medical treatments and I'm getting better, I'm getting my taste and my smell back, there's probably not much to do. Remember, small, medium, or large problem. Now we've got a large problem. We got a patient who still can't smell, or they have weird— like they, they have, you know, parosmias or other things where you're smelling the wrong stuff, or just a few things. Or taste, you know, dysgeusia, or, or other versions of that where you're not tasting appropriately, which is very disturbing. So in addition to the cell things that we're going to talk about in part 2, We want to heal the blood-brain barrier. We're going to get to that. But taste and smell retraining can be very useful. And there's some publications now that show that in both of these cases, although you of course apply these things differently whether it's taste or smell, um, retraining can be helped by taste and odorant molecules, we'll call them. Okay, so what would those be? Well, what you, what you do for taste or smell retraining is to choose things that are not noxious. Okay, so you're not going to use, um, you know, like you're not going to use ammonia or something that's going to burn your nerves or something like that, but you're going to use something strong that has a very particular either taste or smell. palate, you could say, because the sense of smell and the sense of taste are what we call chemoreceptive senses. And so when I taste something or when I smell it, either the direct action of the molecules from the food I eat cause taste sensory reception— so chemoreception— or the odorant molecules coming off of the food or whatever else caused me to smell. Chemoreception. The problem is when we have these nerve inflammation things with, you know, post-COVID or maybe post-vax or whatever, the nerve gets damaged and it has to re-heal, but then it also has to remember how to connect up what you're smelling with the part of your brain that smells, or what you're tasting with parts of your brain that do taste. So retraining and using more potent but not noxious chemicals includes a lot. Now we're seeing recommendations, and there's a few papers written about this too, of using things like, um, uh, for smell, using essential oils that have a strong odorant activity in different areas. So if you're thinking about retraining, you think about like if you, you know, were to break your leg and then it's been in a cast for 6 weeks and now you have to retrain your leg to do everything your leg did. Um, you're going to work usually with physical therapy or somebody, and they're going to work on that. Well, kind of the same with, you know, say, smell or taste retraining. What they recommend in some of the papers is actually that you, um, have a— you know, it's— this is not a blind test, this is a known thing. So let's say you have a potent oil, essential oil of lemon, and your brain does know what lemon you know, smells like. And you smell that and you, um, cognitively, you know, say and think, you know, well, this is lemon. Now, you may not be smelling the lemon at the time, but what you're doing is saying this chemoreception that's happening now here in my smell apparatus and the, um, the association areas that put smell together with that apparatus are saying that's lemon will, will eventually remember what lemon smells like. Keep doing that. Then you could have orange, for example. You could have lavender. You could have other things. Now, why would they recommend in some of this research that we use something potent like an essential oil as opposed to just, uh, you know, maybe a little bit of, uh, you know, a dry herb or something like that, which you could use as well? Well, what they're saying is you want a really strong association with the key chemoreception. So in this case, the smelling part and the chemoreception of the odorant molecule, and then you knowing exactly that that is supposed to smell like lemon, even if it doesn't. And so you do this as a way to retrain. It's very akin to once you get your cast off your leg, you're going to, you know, first figure out how to stand up without having the leg buckled. You're going to figure out how to hold your foot in, you know, on the floor and in space so that you know where you're at. Your proprioceptive senses are going to, you know, have to come back and all of that stuff, and the signals to the muscles. It doesn't happen in a day. Now, with taste, it's usually not so much using like an extract of an essential oil, although it might be, but they still are recommending for the same reason. So remember, now we're not going to smell it as much as we're just going to taste it, I have seen recommendations where they will take, say, a lemon, a lime, or an orange, something that's got some, you know, some taste substance to it. They will put it on heat or a grill or something for, you know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute, to kind of really get those juices going and get some of the taste essential, you know, the sugars and the oils and all that stuff in the fruit and then have you taste it and have you, you know, think about cognitively what you are tasting at that time. There's actually, um, there's actually YouTube videos of people doing this, you know, and just trying it out. Now, what I'll say about the videos— I've seen all the videos— but what I'll say about the videos I've seen is you do want to be careful, because if you've had this problem a long time and you're doing the smell thing with essential oils, or you're doing the tasting with different foods, uh, you know, that day you're not just gonna suddenly get better, right? So a lot of times what they're doing in the taste things is kind of like with the smell things where it's like, okay, I know this is lemon. I can't really smell lemon there, or I smell something other than lemon, but I'm going to smell it and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to say the, the word lemon and think of lemon and try and re-burn in those association areas. Well, with the taste, a lot of times what they'll do is they'll mix like the citrus that they've heated up and then a sweet taste together with it, which cuts the citrus a little bit. But, you know, I've seen people use like citrus and honey, so you know what honey is supposed to taste like, or brown sugar or whatever. And again, it's just trying to get those taste buds and the chemoreception that they do back online. Now, another thing that happens that with, with smell, you have one primary neuro— neurological tract going in the first cranial nerve that helps you with smell, and that goes to a certain area. And then I said there's association areas that say, okay, that smell equals this. With taste, you have not only all of the different, you know, salty and sweet and bitter all that business. But you also have 2 different cranial nerves that get involved in taste. So taste can be a problem if you have your, let's say, 7th cranial nerve front end of your tongue for taste, and then your 9th cranial nerve back end of your tongue for taste, and one of them is working really good and the other one's not working because the 7th you know, uh, 7th cranial nerve was the one that got banged up and the 9th cranial nerve didn't, you get odd tastes. Okay. And so you still have to do the retraining with that. If they're both out, you may not taste anything, and it may take a while to get your taste back. So taste retraining, you can look that up. Like I say, there's YouTube videos and other stuff like that. But, uh, although in, in the medical literature, it's usually listed kind of down towards, well, if all these other things like steroids and maybe certain nasal sprays and other things that the EMT might give you. If they're not working, then try some, you know, smell retraining or taste retraining. Um, I would start doing them, like, if you've had any problems with your sensory apparatus, taste or smell, more than 3 or 4 weeks, I would start to work on retraining regardless of what other treatments you're going to do. Now, as I said, in part 2 of this video, I'm going to talk about there's other stuff that will help those nerves heal, but that's more global. Because those things are going to help everything heal. Now, in the world of the lungs, another group of things that I hear a lot about is chronic recurrent cough and then asthmatic symptoms or wheezing, that sort of thing. And sometimes this takes a manifestation of somebody who's, you know, had asthma before, but now it seems worse since they had COVID, or they never had asthma before, but now they're wheezing All the time. And so with that, uh, certainly if you're having breathing problems, you do want to see your primary care or a specialist or somebody, because there's things that need to be worked up there. You don't want to, you know, have developed asthma, for example, and not have it treated. Asthma can be deadly. Um, so if you have a chronic cough and all this stuff, get it checked out. Now, a lot of times they'll do a chest x-ray, listen to your lungs, Say, well, it's clear, you know, so here's an inhaler in case your wheeze gets real bad or something like that. But there's some things with your lungs that can be helpful to look into that might or might not be looked into. So you might want to check. It is known, actually well known in the literature, but lesser known in the world of the where the rubber meets the road medical practice. that COVID, and in a few cases even the COVID vaccine, but mostly COVID, will either open the door for or reactivate resident infections. 2 of those infections that are known about are chronic respiratory infections that, when they get real bad, cause atypical pneumonia, meaning they don't cause your lungs to fill up with pus, you know, like a strep pneumoniae would or something. But they cause you to have an inflammatory disease in your lungs. And these 2 long-term chronic bacteria do not die on their own. They don't just go away. These are Chlamydia pneumoniae, so not the STD chlamydia, but Chlamydia pneumoniae, its cousin. And then Mycoplasma pneumoniae, which has a whole bunch of subspecies. The good thing is they both die with the same antibiotic strategies. The bad thing is a lot of people don't get tested for them. So if you are still suffering with lung issues, at the very least, the atypical pneumonia bacteria should be screened. It's a blood test, pretty easy. Chlamydia pneumoniae and Mycoplasma pneumoniae. And then in my work with people who've had these problems, I will normally also look and, um, uh, look at the HHV virus series because COVID is known to reactivate Epstein-Barr, and you can check for that on labs, etc. So if you've developed that, please look into that. Now the other thing is, if you develop more wheezing and asthma and there's no, you know, chronic bacteria, chronic virus going on because you got that checked, the next thing that I would really look into would be at least some, uh, inhalant allergy testing. This can be done by an allergist. It can also be done by your primary care through a standard blood test from LabCorp or Quest. It's called the IgE, E like Edward, blood test. And they do what they call regional inhalants. So wherever you live, they've got a panel for the common trees and grasses and stuff like that. And then I usually add there's common mold spore things that you can be allergic to. So I add that on. And then certainly if there was anything else you were allergic to in the past, you can get like cats and dogs and, you know, stuff that you would breathe in, dust mites. The reason I say that is if it's not infectious and you're more than 1 or 2 months out and you're still having wheezing or coughing, you got to check the infections first in my mind. But then allergy is something because of the immunologic effects of post-COVID, post-vaccine that can be triggered. And so maybe you had a very little allergy problem before that you never noticed, or maybe in the spring you've got a stuffy nose or something, but now your immune system is off, you know, it's sort of off on its heels, and these allergies can come back. So if you got lung stuff, I would look into those areas. Now, certainly these chronic infectious things are in the research about, you know, post-COVID for sure. Immune dysregulation, like we talked about, and autoimmunity and stuff is in the research and getting more and more, you know, post-vaccine and post-COVID. But that doesn't mean all of your healthcare providers are going to buy into that or whatever. So you may have to ask. Nothing wrong with asking. And then like we do in other things, if your healthcare provider won't help with those things and you really are still having resident problems, either asking a specialist or finding another healthcare provider might be what you have to do. Now, other areas, um, I'm gonna talk a little bit about this in the specific area, then we'll talk more in the general area coming up in part 2. But when we talk about the neuropsychiatric things, so we got neurological things which are the big picture, uh, peripheral, you know, sense of smell and taste. Uh, then we got the blood-brain barrier leakiness and inflammation problem, and I said that leads to a lot of downstream things. One of the things it leads to is neuropsychiatric manifestations. So we have people who didn't used to have sleep problems that now they do. We have people who didn't used to have depression or anxiety or whatever, now they do. We also have people that used to have really well-controlled, say, bipolar or depression, anxiety, or sleep problems, and now they're not well-controlled. So those things— the first thing you might want to do is, of course, check in with whoever's managing that medically for you. But the next thing is a lot of these things go back to inflammation. This is well characterized in the literature around COVID, certainly, that it creates interleukins and tumor necrosis factor surges that cause this blood-brain barrier and this brain inflammation and stuff. But your brain, because it does everything for you, uh, when you inflame it, it gets to choose how it's going to give you symptoms. So one person has an inflamed brain and they have a neuropsychiatric issue— sleep, anxiety, whatever. Next person gets, you know, neuroinflammation and they don't have any neuropsychiatric problems, but they have profound fatigue. Next person, it's headaches. Next person, it's whatever else your brain does. So on the general side of things, if those are going on, number one, safety first. You know, if it's a neuropsychiatric thing, go to whoever helps you with that. But one of the things that I would say is when we're thinking about these inflammatory things, I want to connect the neuropsychiatric imbalances and what we talked about last week, which is the immune imbalances, because they come from the same place. They both come from inflammatory cytokines, uh, causing an imbalance in either your neurological immunity or your systemic immunity, and then that gives you the symptoms. So peripherally, that would be autoimmunity. In the brain, it might be autoimmunity, it might be neuropsychiatric, it might be pain, might be fatigue, whatever it is. So when we're thinking about these inflammatory things, whether it's immunologic primarily or neuroimmunologic inflammatory, you can see the last podcast, which I'll put a link to down below in the description. But also, you want to think about things that help us with immunoregulation. So one of the things I talked a lot about in prevention and, you know, lowering your disease chance with COVID is vitamin D. And again, vitamins, you can get too much of certain ones, so you do want to work with somebody who's tracking you. But vitamin D and vitamin A can be very helpful in the immunoregulatory area because they're both more hormone-like than really vitamins. Okay, vitamin D and A. Broad botanical things that work across the board Curcumin, Boswellia, and also sometimes called frankincense, but Boswellia, resveratrol, a potent antioxidant. Curcumin is kind of my favorite because it works in the most places. Also, there's, there's a medication that you can find more information on called LDN, or low-dose naltrexone. There's LDN research group that I do speaking and writing for sometimes. And you can find them online. They have a lot of information around prescribing. And if your doctor's interested, but they've never done it, the LDN Research Trust is a really great resource and they can get information there. We use that a lot. We use it in COVID treatment. We use it post-COVID. We use it in post-vax because low dose— now high dose naltrexone is used for addiction. And and overdoses. But low-dose naltrexone, tiny amounts, is used as an immunomodulatory substance, kind of like vitamin D would help and vitamin A and stuff. The other thing, if you're, you know, interested, and this is something that, you know, you want to look into with your healthcare providers, things like cannabidiol, CBD, which is legal in all the states as a supplement, might be appropriate. And you find a provider who's used to using that. But cannabidiol is immunoregulatory, immunomodulatory, which is a good thing. Now, there's other things that are of importance when you get to this immunologic inflammation thing. So if you've had either autoimmunity develop or worsen, or neuropsychiatric things, or profound fatigue, or, you know, these brain-immune connection things, The other thing I talked about last week— excuse me— was beyond what we talked about with the lungs, post-COVID, and now we're seeing a little bit post-vax reactivation of chronic infection. So again, those, you know, you certainly have the pneumonia organisms and Epstein-Barr virus, but there may be other things. Yeah. So what I normally tell people is the low-hanging fruit here is if you used to be a patient who was being treated for a chronic infection, you know, like Lyme disease or C. pneumoniae or Epstein-Barr or cytomegalovirus or any of these other chronic long-term viral or bacterial problems, you should have those rechecked and make sure they didn't reactivate when you, you know, had the interventions you did. Whether it's the infection or vaccine. If you're not, but you're not getting answers, you probably want to get those chronic infections checked. Now the rest of the things in the neuropsychiatric and the immunologic area are going to be here in a couple minutes in part 2, where we're looking at what affects everything that gets damaged. So the The other that I wanted to talk about, because it sort of— it affects everything in your body, but it's a very specific problem people will talk about. And I got a number of hits on social media about people having this particular thing, and that is exercise intolerance and fatigue. So the 2 ways that presents usually— one is you're fatigued all the time. So since the intervention, I am now fatigued. I just feel tired all the time. And/or I'm okay at rest, but when I go out and I exercise like I used to, I have exercise intolerance. I hit a crash. And so one person literally said, you know, I, I'm used to, you know, I'm a runner. And prior to the infection, prior to the vaccine, whatever, I would regularly run, you know, 2 miles a day, 4 miles a day, whatever. You know, people run any number of amounts. Or, you know, I'm a hiker, I do weighted pack hiking or whatever, that's what I like to do. And, you know, before COVID or the vaccine, I could do this much, and after, you know, I can't, I can barely get down the block. Well, one of the things here Now, all the stuff we talked about part 2 will help this as well. But one of the things you have to be careful with is, especially if you're a trained person— so prior to COVID or the vaccine, you, you were— you knew you could run 1 mile, 2 miles, 10 miles every day. Okay, that was your— that's your jam, that's your thing. Now you can't. What you have to remember is your body has to rehab it just like your sense of smell or your taste has to rehab, and it's going to be really slow. Your conditioning tolerance has to rehab, and that's very frustrating for people who are already conditioned and trained because they think, I no longer have COVID, I no longer have my, you know, I'm post-vaccine. Uh, why in the world do I still have exercise intolerance? Because I'm a trained whatever you are. Well, the thing you have to remember is that both of these insults to your body can knock you down 1, 2, or 3, 4 levels of training. So you will not automatically go back to the ability to run 4 miles a day or whatever it is that you were doing before. And I have had people do this. And what we do clinically with them, it is a little bit like the retraining of taste or smell. Well, it is retraining your body and your skeletal muscle and your mitochondria to get back into the game, you have to say, okay, prior to COVID or the vaccine, this is my level of training. That will help you because it's easier to get back there after, but you're not going to do that simply. Now again, small, medium, or large problem. If you're 4 weeks post-COVID or 2 weeks post-vax or whatever and you're exercising as much as you always did, you had a small problem, no problem. Medium problem, 6 weeks. Now you're back to doing whatever, no problem. Large problem though, these people are, you know, 2 months, 6 months, 2 years later, they still can't do what they used to physically. So there's a combo of 2 things you have to do to help. One is the stuff in part 2 that helps all your cells. And the other is graded exercise tolerance, which basically means, okay, I went out and I tried to do what I used to do. So let's say for me that was a 3-mile weighted pack, you know, hike up and down hills, and, you know, I had a route and everything, and I knew how much energy I expended. During COVID I didn't do anything, you know, because I felt like I got run over by a truck. You know, the weeks after COVID, walking around my house was wearing me out, and then I started to, you know, get better. Well, The first thing I noticed was I couldn't put my weighted pack on. I had to just, you know, start to walk a little bit more than around my house. And then I walked a little longer, then I walked a little longer, and I got towards my mileage norm. Still was wearing me out though. Like, you know, let's say I had a 3-mile, you know, weighted pack hike that I did most days. You know, I worked up to about a mile and I was just dogging and tired and stuff. A lot of that has to do with the metabolic stuff we're going to talk about next. But the other thing is, I could not let my mind go and say, we're going to go right back to 3 miles and the same number of weights. I had to start with a quarter mile, no weights, then a half mile, no weights, then a mile, no weights. And work up. You get to 2 miles, you're less fatigued, uh, then you hit the weights and, you know, go on. Same with running. If you were a 4-miler before, you're gonna have to go back and start maybe with a half mile, work your way up. Why? Because your cells get so beaten down and your mitochondria gets so deficient after COVID or the vaccine if you're having these reactions. that you have to retrain them. You have to build them up metabolically, next thing we're coming to, and then you have to physically retrain them. Just like the taste and smell thing where you're connecting what you feel and taste here with your brain centers. Same thing, you got to get your skeletal muscle working in slow steps. Here's the other thing people forget, especially if they're well trained. Now, if you're not well trained, you don't know any better. So you're going to do this probably naturally. But if you are well trained, what you're going to see is you don't go back into training. So let's say you're well trained and you're a 4-mile-a-day runner, but you go on vacation and you take some weeks off and you're having fun and you get this tiny bit out of shape, or you break your ankle and you got a couple of months before your rehab. You find out, you know, in the pre-COVID days, you could kind of go out and maybe, you know, start jogging, work into it, and in 1 week or 2 weeks, kind of be back in your form. Post-COVID, post-vaccine, you can't do that. What used to take you 1, 2, or 3 weeks will now usually take you 2 months. So if your first step that you can do and not get too tired is a half mile, then you have to do that long enough to tolerate it. Once you feel like that's no problem at all, You can't— don't go from a half mile to, you know, 4 miles. You have to go from a half mile to 1 mile. And I'm just using arbitrary numbers, but you get the point. So you literally have to do the stair steps like you were injured. And that is a semi-unique thing to post-COVID and post-vaccine. Now, it's also the same as we see in our cancer patients, uh, you know, after radiation, chemotherapy, and stuff, but that's That's, you know, pretty big insults as well to the body. So you have to treat yourself, uh, like you're more injured than you were. Okay, so in this last section, I want to talk about what are the things that we can tie together that would be beneficial all the way around. So when we're looking at what ties these things, whether it's neurological, the blood-brain barrier damage, fatigue, exercise intolerance, lung repairs, neuropsychiatric, immunologic, whatever. One of the big things in the center is blood-brain barrier repair and mitochondrial health. Okay, those are your 2 big targets. Blood-brain barrier repair, if you put together things like choline, which helps your brain, Omega-3 oils and EPA, DHA, those guys. Some things like I mentioned curcumin, you know, other things that are anti-inflammatory or leveling, those are very helpful with the blood-brain barrier and also the immune dysregulation. What I've been using clinically, and I have absolutely no financial connection to this, You go to their website, you can look them up. But I've been using a lot with people post-COVID, post-vax, when there's anything to do with the blood-brain barrier or any neurological symptoms, is something called Cover-3, because it has a combination of the particular type of choline, it's got omega-3s, it's got trans-resveratrol, it's got curcumin, all in one little packet. Tastes really good. And again, I don't make anything for their, their company. I have nothing to do with— I just use their stuff. It's over the counter. It's easy. You just go online, Coverthree, c-o-v-e-r-t-h-r-e-e.com, and they have a kid version and adult version. What I've been doing with patients— and again, you talk to your healthcare providers about this— but what I do, if they have a lot of this neurological stuff, neuropsychiatric, neurologic, neuroinflammatory, central fatigue, any other problems that come from your brain getting inflamed. I usually do a packet in the morning and a packet at night and do that for a month. And then I do one packet a day for the second, third, and fourth month. And then usually by then, things are starting to work again. The next thing we do, which is a little bit more on the medical side, it's not quite a natural thing, is what's called neurosteroids, which sounds weird and bad, but like these are endogenous things inside. You can have crashes in your neurosteroids after, and this is something that's best to kind of work with a healthcare provider on. But neurosteroids include things like progesterone, pregnenolone, and DHEA. And we give these to people with fat or in a fatty pill or fatty substance so that it absorbs Faster and it doesn't go through your liver. And the neurosteroids are also being researched. They help us after traumatic brain injuries. Well, it turns out that helps the blood-brain barrier heal up as well. The next thing to consider is— so I said you got blood-brain barrier and brain inflammation to repair. So that's stuff like that Cover-3 supplement, and no connection, you know, the neurosteroids. Other things there. Then you've got mitochondrial repair, and this helps with your whole body. It helps to perk you back up after the fatiguing events and helps your nerves heal and helps everything else that we haven't talked about yet specifically. So these things— diet and exercise actually are very helpful, but you want to work into the exercise slowly. Diet, essentially, you eat the way you're going to eat But the lower glycemic load you can have, so the less you're spiking your insulin. So look at low glycemic type diets, basically good sources of protein and fats, vegetables that are low glycemic, and then a little bit of fruit and stuff. But then also some supplements that we use with people. And again, you check these out with your healthcare providers, but carnitine, Carnitine is used specifically at your mitochondria to take fat energy and put it in and burn it. So it's a transport mechanism for energy. So carnitine, things that support nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, NAD+. So we use supplementally with people nicotinamide mononucleotide, NMN. or nicotinamide riboside, NR. We use those orally. Again, ask your doctor, don't take them on your own. Also, alpha-lipoic acid, often thought of as an antioxidant. It's a very good supplement to help your mitochondria recover. B vitamins is one we use a lot called the Methyl Balance from Priority One, but, you know, B vitamins generally Again, work with somebody who does this sort of stuff if you're going to get into it, but mitochondrial repair is very, very helpful. Now, the stuff like in the COVID 3, and if you do neurosteroids with somebody, those will help. Generally speaking, they'll help get your brain less inflamed and healed, but the mitochondria have to be targeted, which is very important. So when we're thinking about mitochondria, again, you know, low glycemic diet, slow graded exercise tolerance, don't go too fast. Carnitine or acetyl carnitine, the amino acid, alpha-lipoic acid, B vitamins, and then something to support NAD+, which is 2 vitamin B3s stuck together with a couple of riboses. It's a big energy transport molecule, and that's usually orally, like nicotinamide riboside or NMN. Those are supplements. And again, run it by your doctor. The other thing is, um, if you're really fatigued, you do want to get your thyroid rechecked, even if it was fine before you had COVID or the vax or whatever. Thyroid, cortisol, things of that nature, all worth checking. But again, that's not as much on the natural side, which is what I wanted to focus on today. All right, well, we're running down in time here. We just have a little bit of time left. And just to recap, number one, post-COVID or post-vax, if you have a small or medium problem and it goes away on its own, great, it's gone. Large problem, it's still there 2 months in, 6 months in, 2 years in, you got a big problem. It's going to take a long time to heal. The first rule of post-COVID or post-vax, it takes a very, very long time. or nerve retraining with smell and taste. We might need to do specific things with the lungs, like looking for lung bacteria and allergies and chronic viruses and stuff. But then there's global things— blood-brain barrier, that supplement I talked about, Cover-3. Again, no affiliation, it just works better than anything I've seen, and it's got all this stuff in one packet. Do 2 of those a day for a month and then one a day for 2, 3 months, depending on how long it takes you to heal. That'll help brain inflammation, everything. And then mitochondrial repair, you get your diet and your exercise, but then alpha-lipoic acid, uh, NAD supplements, so nicotinamide riboside or NMN, carnitine, B vitamins, and then everything else going to be specific to you, hopefully, when you work with a healthcare provider. Well, we are out of time today. And it's been wonderful speaking with you about natural type of interventions for post-COVID previously. And I'll put this all down in the, uh, in the show notes. Previously we talked about immunologic things post-COVID and post-vaccine. But I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. This is Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, and I will see you all with another installment next week on the podcast.
